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Good video. I disagree that the government should do anything about it though. What's the alternative, make them homeless? If there is both supply and demand, l

• wyuenho 14y ago
  The problem is there is no supply and lots of demand. I'm too lazy to google for this, but the latest figure is something like demand is 2-3x greater than land supply. The government absolutely have to do something about this or this city will implode.
• bjourne 14y ago
  No, the alternative is to have the government build subsidized housing and then enact strict price controls so that even poor families can afford to live reasonably. That's how it was done in Singapore for example and is why they can live in "spacious" 30-70 m^2 apartments despite having a higher population density than Hong Kong. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore.
  • Adaptive 14y ago
    Yes this. The HK govt is appalling in its disregard of the poverty line. (>6yrs in HK, and I'm no SG fanboy, but it is SO far beyond HK in this, there is just no comparison)
    • yskchu 14y ago
      Can you quantify this? HK has one of the best welfare systems in the world.
      • fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
        I think the problem in HK is the number of undocumented immigrants. No papers, no open borders, surrounded mostly by water, these people are easy to exploit. I was told that many of the construction workers' (building skyscrapers) wages barely amount to the cost of the day's food.
        • Evbn 14y ago
          It's sort of amazing the people in these conditions care enough about quality of work to build buildings that don't fall down.
          • fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
            Cough, ahem, well, it was also explained to me that there may be some systematic labor-related problems with construction quality in those buildings. Not exactly related to worker pay-rate, but the gist is that they tend to pour the concrete too wet (because it is easier/faster to work). This is probably because of productivity-based bonus pay for foremen. The difference in strength isn't enough to cause a building to fail under nominal conditions, but catastrophic failure is more probable in some destructive event (weather, earthquake, explosion, etc).
      • Adaptive 14y ago
        An agency colleague and I did volunteer design and marketing work for a Hong Kong food bank (St. James). At the time it was one of the few food banks in HK (I don't know if this has changed or not, but I'd be surprised if it has). Part of our initial work was research and I was pretty shocked that the HK govt didn't even set a national poverty line. Given a rough line of half median income, over a million HK residents were easily below at the time. If you're talking strictly social security, even the government acknowledges it has a problem. Here's a recent SCMP article where the welfare dept itself states that at least 40% of HK residents in poverty aren't covered by welfare. http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1062025/700000-slip-through-hong-kongs-welfare-net http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1062025/700000-sl... (mirror: http://goo.gl/GxyTw http://goo.gl/GxyTw ) The good news is that the HK govt did, finally, just implement a standard poverty line (half median income). This is the first step and a long time in coming.
  • wilfra 14y ago
    I disagree it is the governments job to give people a place to live. From the sounds of it, Hong Kong already does a lot of this. At some point, people need to take care of themselves.
    • EricDeb 14y ago
      It is absolutely the governments job to give people places to live if they are unable (not unwilling) to do so on their own. The difficulty lies in determining who is truly unable and who is simply unwilling.
      • cglace 14y ago
        It is absolutely your opinion that it is their job.
        • eigenvector 14y ago
          It is the job of the people to determine what the job of the government is.
          • cglace 14y ago
            That was my point.
    • bjourne 14y ago
      You are free to hold your opinion. But at least be upfront with that you consider it an ideological issue as there obviously are reasonable alternatives to having poor people live in prison cells.
      • wilfra 14y ago
        they are not being forced to live there, they are choosing to do so and paying rent. they are free to move anywhere else they want, including across the border to mainland china where it is much cheaper.
  • greggman 14y ago
    Is that really how it works in SG? I've been told housing prices are outrageous there and if you're too poor to afford public housing you get shipped off to the poor house and are not allowed to leave unless you can find someone to take responsibility for you. Note: I've only visited SG so this is 2nd hand info through my friends in SG.
    • redact207 14y ago
      That's sort of how it works here. The Singaporean housing market is divided into HDB (public housing) and Condo (private housing). Condo's nowadays start at around SGD 1m for something small and basic, but aren't such a bad deal with banks charging interest of just 1.8% on a 40 year loan. Most Singaporeans can't afford this with an average monthly wage of just SGD 2,000 per month. Public housing on the other hand is heavily subsidised and somewhat controlled for PRs and citizens. FYI Singapore was a giant slum up until the government formed the HDB board in the 1960s. The CPF (Singapore's retirement fund) can be used as a deposit against your apartment which nowadays start at SGD 300,000 if you go far from the city. As you can guess, this results in many people having a lot of cash tied up in non-liquid assets when they retire that leads to a host of other issues. I moved to Singapore 3 years ago from Australia and love the place and prefer life here to Hong Kong any day.
      • hollerith 14y ago
        >Condo's nowadays start at around SGD 1m for something small and basic 1,000,000 SGD is about 800,000 USD.
        • Evbn 14y ago
          But effectively half that with the (subsidized?) interest rates.
      • adrinavarro 14y ago
        Well, that makes around 1200 EUR. So, that's even better than the "common" (not avg) monthly wage in many places in Europe. Indeed, cost of living in Singapore must be over the roof…
  • yskchu 14y ago
    48% of the HK population already live in government provided/subsidized housing, that's already very high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Hong_Kong#Housing_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Hong_Kong#Housing_st...
  • Quiark 14y ago
    I was in Singapore and now I'm living in HK. Reading that SG has higher density than HK made was surprising, because here in HK there are so many needle-like apartment buildings, but I didn't see that so much in SG. I think the reason is that HK does have bigger area than SG but actually far less land is being used in HK (many hills), so practically speaking, the density is higher in HK :)
  • saosebastiao 14y ago
    Public housing or housing vouchers are one thing. Price controls are another. Price controls are absolutely, without a single empirical doubt, the worst policy you could enact. You might as well start torching your housing supply...the effects are the same.
    • dllthomas 14y ago
      Hyperbolic, but accurate when you've accounted for that.
    • Evbn 14y ago
      Vouchers without controls drive up prices, becoming a transfer from govt to landlords. Public owned housing is the answer.
      • saosebastiao 14y ago
        Vouchers with artificial limitations on new development drive up prices, becoming a transfer from govt to landlords Eliminating artificial limitations on new development is the answer.
  • anovikov 14y ago
    People are driven to these places by economic opportunities. They are not living in cages because they have nothing else to do, but because they want to live in Hong Kong, even much better conditions in mainland China is of no interest to them. This is like how people abandon their well built, fully paid out 3-bedroom apartments in mainland Russia and flock to Moscow where they share rooms with strangers, with 5-10 people living together in an apartment in their 30s. This isn't poverty, this is how people try to escape poverty. They cannot be helped to do it (otherwise more people will flock in - you can't move all China/all Russia to Hong Kong/Moscow), and should not be banned from trying (that kills economic progress, with Russians staying in Russian province means they will simply slowly die of vodka, in Moscow they might do something useful, i think same goes to Chinese).
  • cynicalkane 14y ago
    > the government build subsidized housing and then enact strict price controls You're aware that the US has been doing this since the 1950s, right? And it hasn't worked as well for us?
• tehwalrus 14y ago
  to rebut this sticking to your libertarian premise (which I don't agree with, but you might actually listen then!): Government intervention caused this. The government strictly controls which land can be built on, and restricts supply so much that this is what is left. If government stopped restricting which land developers could buy, build on, and sell as housing (which is a bad idea for another reasons, but not libertarian ones) then this problem would go away.
  • wilfra 14y ago
    Libertarians are not the only ones who believe it is not the governments responsibility to provide for the poor.
    • king_jester 14y ago
      It is the responsibility of society and communities to end situations that even allow for the poor to exist, otherwise we are simply sending people to their doom.
      • wilfra 14y ago
        Well hey, I'll get on board with that. Sounds like an impossibility though unless you're a country like Kuwait with an endless supply of money you don't have to work for and a tiny population.
        • lilsunnybee 14y ago
          Maybe, if there weren't many wealthy people out in the world buying worthless shit with their money, power and influence.
      • sadfasdfa 14y ago
        Coming from a family of humble means, poor, whom emigrated to the US from Mexico I can tell you that a lot of the reasons that poor people are poor is because they choose to be poor. So forgive me if I'm not too sympathetic about poor people. In the USA of all the friends that I had I was the only one to go to college. We were all in the same boat but I chose to study and do my homework and they did not. Then there were lots of other students that not only would they not care about their studies but they actually made it worse for the rest of us in a daily basis. They got into gangs, smoke pot, bullied other students, where disruptive during class. You know what, fuck them. They chose to waste their youth, they chose to do nothing with their lives so I don't give a fuck about them being poor. I was there, in the trenches with them and I can tell you that nobody forced them to waste their lives. They did it of their own will.
• 7952 14y ago
  If San Francisco allowed the sale of contaminated food there would be demand for it from people who have no choice. This is really a consumer rights issue. The landlords should provide a basic standard of safety for such high rents. The scope for exploitation is huge and the government should protect people from that. The size issue is less important.
  • wilfra 14y ago
    If landlords are exploiting people and providing unsafe places to live, then that should be dealt with. I haven't seen anybody other than you mention those things though. People are just appalled by how small and ugly the rooms/cages are and they feel sorry for the people who choose to live there. The government shouldn't tell people who want to pay to live there that they cannot do so.
    • 7952 14y ago
      They mentioned in the video concerns about hygiene and electrical safety, and cockroaches. Twenty people sharing a toilet, how well do you think that works? What I am suggesting it telling landlords what they can and cannot do, not the residents. Every slum in the world has numerous landlords that don't maintain acceptable standards. To pretend that very poor people have the consumer freedom to challenge that is ignorant.
• antihero 14y ago
  Or, take money from people who are minted and have lots of money and use said money to make these poor people's lives less awful. Wealth distribution on this planet is fucking terrible.
  • wilfra 14y ago
    That works once, then it stops working in the future and backfires because people would no longer be motivated to create wealth in that jurisdiction. Which means no jobs and no tax revenue.
    • mjn 14y ago
      How long does it take to stop working? I'm living in Copenhagen, and it seems to have been working here for quite a while now. And it makes the city much nicer for everyone. As a middle-class professional, I don't need the social welfare system myself (at least, not currently), but I still do benefit from the quality of life that comes from living in a city with very low crime, relatively low poverty, and reasonably good (though far from perfect) economic equality. Occasionally people do leave, whether for tax reasons or other reasons, but on the whole even the wealthy agree that the quality of life you get from living here is worth the expense paid in taxes, compared to moving somewhere that's more unequal and more violent. If anything I would guess there is a net influx of well-off people, and there would be more of one if immigration rules were loosened, to make it easier for wealthy people to move here from outside Europe.
      • mseebach 14y ago
        > How long does it take to stop working? For Denmark, about another 7 years. Why do you think the government is acting the way it does? (For those not familiar with the situation, pursuing a reform strategy in straight opposition of explicit pre-election promises). By then, the baby-boomers will have retired and the smallest generation in modern history is left to pay for everything. As for crime, there is no evidence that low inequality causes low crime rates, or the opposite. Significantly more inequal Switzerland and Singapore has lower homicide rates.
• lazyjones 14y ago
  > I disagree that the government should do anything about it though. What's the alternative, make them homeless? If there is both supply and demand, let people do what they want Does letting people do what they want include building without permits (esp. on allotments not designated for housing)? It doesn't work this way, governments already exercise strong control over the housing market due to laws and regulations. I don't live in HK, but where I live, the large property funds (whose demand has nothing to do with housing) have a dramatic effect on prices - they cause an artificial shortage by purchasing everything on the market, thereby increasing the value of their own portfolio (and their rents). So just "letting people do what they want" isn't going to help the housing situation, it just increases the GDP. The government should use the increased taxes (if any - too many loopholes) to compensate the negative effects.